Face-to-Face with His Ancestor! A Contract with a God

As he spoke, Carter stepped forward to knock on the door.

Evan moved ahead of him. "Professor Carter, let me. She's my ancestor, after all!"

Carter nodded and gave Evan a reassuring look.

Evan took a deep breath, held the gift box of magic potions in one hand, and rapped his knuckles against the rotting wooden door.

The surface didn't feel like wood. It felt more like waterlogged skin.

"Ancestor! Great-Grandmother! Are you home?"

"It's me, your good descendant, your devoted great-grandson Arkham! I've come to visit!"

Behind him, Carter watched Evan knock and shout, a faint smile on his lips.

This kid really is something.

After Evan's knock, the door creaked open a crack.

A stale, moldy stench rushed out.

Through the gap, Evan saw an old woman.

She was shriveled, short, and hunched, her entire upper body bent downward as though by disease.

Her limbs were skin and bone, and she barely reached Evan's waist.

Deep wrinkles crisscrossed her face. Her cheekbones jutted out above sunken eyes.

A gray kerchief covered her head, and she had the hooked nose and pointed chin of a witch from a comic book.

There was none of the ageless beauty or lofty authority Evan had expected.

Nor did she have the unfathomable aura or mysterious form he had imagined.

The old woman before him looked almost no different from any ordinary, ailing grandmother.

Decay and age clung to her as though she already had one foot in the grave, along with the sinister, repulsive air of a fairy-tale witch.

The old woman raised her dry, eerie face toward Evan's smiling one.

Then she grinned, showing the few yellow teeth she had left. "You've got some nerve, boy!"

"I didn't come looking for you, yet here you are at my door."

Her voice